U.S. Smokers Are Lighting Up Less

Smokers in the U.S. are smoking less and are more likely to quit than their counterparts in the past, according to research published in Tobacco Control. This runs counter to the common notion that as smoking rates have declined, the remaining smokers are more likely to be “hardcore”—that is, unwilling or unable to quit.

According to the researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, this shows that current anti-tobacco policies have been working and that there’s no need to encourage the use of electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, as a way to help hardcore smokers quit. In any case, as these and other researchers have found, e-cigarettes are of unproven value as quit-smoking aids and may get nonsmokers, especially young ones, hooked on nicotine. In 2015 the influential U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, in its updated guidelines about smoking cessation, concluded that there are too many unknowns about e-cigarettes to recommend them for this purpose.